Colossus
by Sleydo
Summary: A Terran commando team gets pulled into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse when their prey turns the tables.
1. The Job

They left the base in the early morning, three hours after the failed attack had nearly broken their defenses. The Protoss had come at them one last time, in terrifying force and with war machines Victor hadn't known existed until they'd started trying to kill him. The aliens had pulled no punches that night, and the last of the tall bladed warriors suitably referred to as 'zealots' had thrown themselves into the teeth of the Terran defenses to die rather than retreat. 'The last stand,' the colonel had called it, and declared the night a victory. Victor, who had spent an hour of that particular 'last stand' deep in the corpses the Protoss had made of the rest of his platoon, had privately wondered which side the colonel was referring to.

There were no real protoss survivors to speak of, but two of the Protoss war machines had seemingly gone rogue before the end of the fight. They'd turned and retreated while the zealots were still charging into the centre of the Terran firing line, and no-one which had watched them go had done anything but breathe a prayer of thanks to whatever gods they felt could watch over such a blighted region of the Universe. Nobody with any real authority had found out about that particular fuck-up until after the machines were miles away and still moving, and nobody with a pulse saw much point in pursuing an enemy with a history of ambush and trap tactics. When the sunrise came up, of course, all of that fear vanished with the darkness, and the colonel had declared it a priority to kill the damn things before they came back.

Their air support, mostly aging Wraiths but for a couple Banshees the Dominion had sent them the plans for a month ago, was intact or close enough to intact to fight an enemy with no anti-air support. Unfortunately, there wasn't much fuel to go around and while a fast assault would be possible a scouting op was out of the question. That left a ground team to do the tracking work, and call down the targets to air support at a distance.

So now Victor Lawson, a Lieutenant as of one and a half hours ago, had been assigned a ragtag commando group that had been assembled out of the few experienced survivors left of the ground regiments. He watched his command as they came out of the base.

Three Death's Head Regiment marines, the white-paint skulls fresh on their armor. Victor had been introduced just before they'd left; he remembered their names as Donovan, Julia, and Ben. Death's Heads were hard as nails and on top of that these new recruits would have a reputation to fulfill. They would be tough, reliable... maybe a little enthusiastic. Victor made a mental note to wait several days for the dulling monotony of recon duties to wear them down before he put them on point; he wanted them sharp but not hungry.

They had heavy support as well, a marauder named Willis who had as many kill markings on his armor as there were marines in the base. He'd apparently been a sergeant, before Protoss had hacked his squad into piles of meat and wasted armor. Victor felt a pang of empathy for the man.

The last one was a quiet ghost operative named Anna who generally kept to herself when she wasn't out on recon missions. Anna was medium sized and dark-haired, and wore roughly half the amount of armor Victor and the others were in even without allowing for the lighter kit requirements of a ghost. Victor wondered if all of the ghosts wore only a sniper's visor in lieu of a full protective helmet, or if it was just the mentally unbalanced ones.

The path they took out of the base took them straight path past where Victor had been posted for the night. The crowded streets walled by marine barracks and tent cities of support staff gave way to a high ground of sorts, with trenches and other improvised defenses making deep furrows that gradually led outward. Vic tried not to let his eyes follow the path the trenches made outwards, to the bunkers like the one he'd been fighting for his life in hours ago.

Willis fell in beside him. "Shit," he murmured. "This where you were posted, Lieutenant?"

"Just Vic, so long as we're on recon detail for the next couple weeks. But yeah." Victor shook off the pervasive numbness that was beginning in the base of his gut, and made himself point out Bunker A3. "The 41st was down there for a good six hours, holding off zealot charges. We were doing all right until those _things_ came down on us."

Willis nodded understandingly. He'd have to had seen the terrible machines they were hunting now as well; they were fairly hard to miss. "How many got out, man?"

Vic pushed out a breath and made himself say it. "Just me. All the others bought it."

"Bastards," said Willis harshly. "So this is personal for you, huh."

Victor shrugged. "Dunno if it can be. The Protoss are all dead, right? Can't take revenge on a fucking computer."

"You just try, man. When we catch up, maybe we just tell the birds to cripple those things instead of kill, huh. Then you can borrow Anna's gun, since that pea shooter of yours isn't high enough caliber, and get some payback. Maybe a souvenir or two."

Victor forced a chuckle. "Yeah. Maybe."

Anna tilted her head, from several meters away, and put her hand to her ear. Over the comms, Victor heard, "Sure. Just remember how hard these C-10s kick when you do."

"Hey, he'll do that," said Willis. He drifted towards Anna as they walked, and Victor actually wondered for a moment whether he'd have to put both of them down hard for fraternization between ranks. Then he kicked himself for a paranoid psycho and took point for Anna while she drifted back to talk to Willis.

"So," said Willis. "Never seen you around the base before. When did you deploy here?"

"Back about two months ago. But I've been on recon missions the whole time, so I believe you when you say that."

"No shit? Where were you when they hit?"

" I was in on patrol when they started in on us," said Anna. "Had to fight my way into our own lines."

"You're pretty fucking tough, then. Kill your share?"

Anna shrugged modestly, then gestured at his kill tags. "What about you?"

"I get by. So how come you got picked for this?"

"Probably because I know a little about the Protoss." Anna drew her finger along the stock of the long sniper's rifle strapped to her back. "One of the reasons I was deployed here was as intel support for an anticipated attack."

"Yeah? Impress me."

Anna thought for a moment to think, long enough for Victor to think she'd given up the conversation entirely, and then gave Willis a broad grin. "Fine," she said. "For one thing? Those two machines we're chasing? The Protoss call them _kul'nazeen_."

Willis turned to look at her, interested. "What's it mean?"

"Mmm. Little hard to translate. _Kul _means predator, or hunter. _Nazeen _is a modifier, but generally means large or powerful. It also has connotations with being old." Anna shrugged. "Us impressive intel operatives just call it a Colossus."


	2. The Trail

Victor had been recon for six years. He'd grown into the careful pattern of concentration which tracking an enemy required. Find tracks. Confirm they were from the prey. Extrapolate trajectory and look for more tracks. Maybe use satnav intel to figure out where the enemy could be headed, and double check the surrounding area for any indication of a trick. Then repeat. By the fifth time he'd ordered the Death's Heads out on another sweep, he could see the boredom coming off them in steam. He mostly did it for thoroughness, anyway, so it didn't matter too heavily too him whether they were doing their jobs that diligently. The colossi were surprisingly light, and their tracks were small and shallow in the craggy and tough mineralized ground, but they were walking in a straight line and they weren't making any apparent effort to hide that. Victor could almost have tracked them alone and blindfolded.

They made solid, consistent progress for several hours. As the day wore on, Victor tried to think of how the colossi would take this new command from him. He ordered them away from the tracks and followed them at a distance. He sent the Death's Heads on increasingly wide patrols around their path, searching for an enemy that could double back and come down on them out in the open. He had his suit AI pull up an interface with the satnav and plotted out boltholes where the group could sleep safely in cover he doubted a colossus would be able to see through.

Near sundown, Anna made an exclamatory noise. She lay down on the ground, and peered into the direction of the tracks, playing with her sniper's visor. Finally she keyed her headset.

"Visual. 2 colossi, 12 kilometres away. Still retreating due south."

Victor pulled the group to a stop, and had them crouch down into whatever cover was available. "Condition?"

"One fully intact. The other has sustained damage to one of its legs, and there are burn marks along its body. It's limping."

"Show me."

Victor waited, anxiety and adrenaline clamped down beneath years of discipline under fire, while Anna rerouted the view from her visor into the suit radio. After a few seconds, the black-brown vista of rocky plains interspersed with rising hills and cliff-edged mountains on Victor's helmet faded out and resolved into a grainy, magnified video of their prey.

Victor's breath caught, as if snagged on a rough piece of shrapnel from the night before.

The night before:

_He's panting, his damp breaths steaming up his helmet before the humidity is yanked back into the suit rebreather. His heart's thumping hard in his chest and it feels like it's trying to jump out of him and run away. Victor can understand that. He'd run, too, if it wasn't for the fact there was nowhere to go. There's only one exit out of Bunker A3, and it's occupied. Private Reilly is in front of him, firing on full auto into whatever's outside, screaming obscenities. He's 20 years old, born and raised in a small town that used to be a few kilometers away, grew up fighting in tavern brawls and still new to fighting armored. Victor trained Reilly himself, for the past four months, from the moment Reilly was posted in his squad. _

_Now, Victor's about to watch him die in slow motion. _

_Something hot blue, the color of a welding jet, slashes out from beyond the confines of the bunker. It goes straight through Reilly, and before it cuts through Reilly's radio gear Victor can hear Reilly's battle cries turn into a shrill animal shriek. The pitiful remnants of Reilly's lower body remain standing, just for a second, before a solid kick from whatever's beyond the bunker egress throw it into a corner of the room. A tall alien warrior, face utterly devoid of anything except two cold eyes like bright polished stones, hunches down and forces its way in. _

_The rest of the bunker lights up with return fire. Victor, Gyles, and Paul come out with full auto, and in the sudden deluge of bullets the zealot retreats. The bunker is quiet again, and filled with the stench of metal and flesh cooked and fused together. Quiet enough that Victor can finally hear the voice coming through on his radio. _

_"-say again. Bunker A3, Tac Com. Sitrep. Bunker A3, Tac Com. Sitrep."_

_Victor punches the return key. "Tac Com, Bunker A3. We are overrun. I repeat, overrun. Three casualties and the bunker is compromised. Request back-up. Over."_

_"Bunker A3, Tac Com. All reserves are deployed. Request denied. Hold position or retreat to defense line B, over."_

_"Shit," Paul says softly. "Anybody want to try going outside?"_

_"Then we hold," says Victor. _

_There's a sharp laugh from Gyles, who gestures at the massive hole where the secure airlock entrance used to be. "How do you plan to do that, sir? No way we can put that shit back together."_

_Victor thinks hard, just breathing. Finally he says, "Mine it. Use the fusion core from Reilly's suit."_

_"What're we going to use for a trigger? Reilly's suit radio got cooked."_

_"Try bullets," Victor says. He hunkers down, manages to point his gun at the entrance. "Gyles, you're up. Get that core out of Reilly and-"_

_It might have worked. When unarmored, fusion cores were pretty unstable, and at least it would been a deterrent until the zealots could bring up something with range so that they wouldn't have to do a kamikaze run just to get into the bunker. Command could have come up with some back-up units, or some idealistic idiots from defense line B could have decided to mount a rescue op based more on the principle of Leave No Man Behind rather than reality. Or the Protoss could have decided to bypass them entirely and hit somewhere else, leaving them stranded but alive until morning._

_It might have worked. But instead, there was a sudden terrible noise and the top of the bunker caved in. Victor doesn't even realize what was going on until a piece of rebar only partially stripped of concrete falls on top of him. It's heavy enough that, suited up or not, he may as well have just stepped underneath a falling building. He's pinned down, and half his body is trapped underneath the rubble, and all he can do is look up at what's coming down on all of them._

_It's maybe a hundred metres tall, and curiously fragile-looking despite its size. Four thin, spindly legs support a massive body which flares outwards into an organic oval shape. Victor, transfixed, watches it as it steps delicately over the rubble of his former shelter. Far above him, a bulky and insectile photoreceptor-equipped head casts about, searching. For a moment it turns downwards, and it seems to spot him. _

_The list of squad members on Victor's helmet screen has just flashed out Gyles' name; he must have been killed in the collapse. But Paul managed to get out, somehow, and now he's standing on top of the rubble, firing upwards at the alien machine as if he actually thinks he has a chance. If one of Mengsk's propoganda journalist assholes was out there right now, he could have snapped a picture of the scene and lived like a king off of the royalties. _

_The machine just looks down at Paul, as if curious. Then one of its legs crashes down and spears him through the chest like a minnow on a fisherman's hook. It raises him up and he thrashes and struggles and gouts blood, studying him as if curious, before it shakes him off and walks on. _

_Victor waits there, barely breathing, as the alien advance passes over him. He waits for hours, and tries not to listen to the screams as the Protoss forces collide with defense line B._

_They drag him out of the rubble a little before sunrise._

Victor shook off the sudden terror and made himself focus. 

"Range?" His helmet didn't have that kind of telemetry system built into it.

"Ten kilometers, give or take a klick. Speed approximately forty kilometers an hour."

"Anna, keep watching them." Victor tuned the suit radio to the tactical command frequency.

"Tac Com, Recon 1. Tac Com, this is Recon 1, over."

"Recon 1, Tac Com actual." The Colonel didn't even need to announce himself like that; Victor could pick out his gravelly, Korhal-accented voice over the static with ease. "Report."

"Sir, visual on the targets. One is wounded with sustained damage to one leg, repeat sustained damage to one leg. The other is intact. Distance 12 kilometres, path steady at 183 degrees south-south-east. Request air support."

"Denied. We're still fueling the birds, and we can't run night assaults. Keep on them, wait until morning."

_Fuck. _Victor felt a sharpened, icy feeling gathering in the lower recesses of his gut. He keyed the 'talk' button again.

"Sir, permission to speak freely."

"Granted, Lieutenant."

"These things are one-man armies, sir. They're a hundred metres tall and I heard last night they burned half a platoon to cinders. I watched one kill a man by _stepping _on him. We need to start hitting these things now, with whatever we have. The moment they see we're behind them they're going to come back around and wipe us out. Sir."

For about ten seconds, there was just static.

"Lieutenant."

"Yes, sir."

"You're the best damn scout we've got left alive. You'll get the job done. And besides that, they're fucking _machines_. We don't have reliable combat AI, and the Dominion's been trying at it for years. These things are probably programmed to cut and run if their controllers die. "

"Sir, it's a Protoss-"

"Spare me the superstitious bullshit, Lieutenant, and do your job. Over."

_Well, I tried. _"Sir. Ack out." Victor pulled his suit radio back onto the squad frequency.

"What's the word, sir?" Willis asked.

"Air support isn't ready yet. We're tracking them until next morning." Victor hunkered down, and pulled up the satnav, sending the signal to the rest of his squad while he was at it. "I don't see a lot of good cover between us and them. Anna, I've heard some stories about ghosts. Can you cloak?"

He could almost hear her smile over the radio. "That's classified."

"I know. But can you?"

Anna giggled suddenly. The sound was curiously childlike. "Yep!"

"Then we'll stay low here. You follow them for the night, give us telemetry. In the morning we'll hit them. You get any bad gut feelings, maybe start feeling like you're about to get ambushed, pull back. We'll start over in the morning if that happens."

"Sir yes sir." Anna's whimsical mood seemed to fall away from her like fog in a high wind. She crouched down, getting herself into cover where the Colossi wouldn't be able to spot her, and became very still. As Victor watched, her suit shifted into a rolling nearly-transparent refraction of the environment in front of her. Within about a minute, she was gone except for a few minute distortions of light which barely framed the shape of a human being unless Victor tried hard to spot it.

Willis whistled. "Fucking uncanny." The Death's Heads said nothing, but Victor watched them glance between each other as if uncertain.

"Right," said Victor, "get yourselves in cover and get some sleep. We'll be at it again at dawn. I want three 5-hour shifts, with two people up for the last two. Willis, you're on first. Julia and Ben are next, then me and Donovan. Suit radios stay on and in contact with Anna. Switch the radio to stealth settings in case those things can monitor us."

They all settled in, and for the next several hours nothing happened. Victor managed to pull down a few grams of rations from the armor reserve but found he wasn't hungry. A couple of the Death's Heads went to sleep for Willis' shift. Victor found that every time he blinked he saw minute tracings of the hot blue blades favored by the zealots, or Reilly dying all over again. He stopped trying to go to sleep after about an hour. He began to quietly check over his gear, restarting the process every time he finished. After about eight hours, he heard a noise nearby him and realized Willis was doing the same. The burly marauder seemed to hear him in kind. He looked over at Victor, frozen in halfway finishing the disassembly of his weapon's ammo pack, Marauder mask impassive despite the human features beneath. Then he looked away and kept working.

About half an hour passed.

Anna's voice over the comm. "Recon group, recon 5. The Colossi are splitting up."

Victor sat up radio protocols suddenly forgotten. "What?"

"I say again, Colossi are splitting up. The uninjured on has turned and is now heading due north east. The injured one is still proceeding."

"Shit. Recon, shake it off and get up! We have work to do."

Willis pulled his ammo pack together with barely-shaken calm. "Sir, what are we going to do anyway? It's open terrain. They'll spot us."

"I know, but we don't have much of a choice. What do you want to bet the Colonel won't want to send out his air support if for all we know there's a colossus heading straight for the base?"

"Oh. Fuck."

"Yeah." Victor finished putting his rifle back together, and found the Death's Heads were already standing ready. "We're pursuing the injured party, Recon. Anna will follow the uninjured one. When sunrise comes, we feed Tac Com the telemetry and go home."

"Recon 1, Recon 5. I can't do that; I can't cloak for much longer. I was planning to use some of the cover out here, scope them for the air group. But the intact one is accelerating."

"_What_?"

"It's hit sixty kph and it's still climbing, sir. I'd need a Hellion to stay with this thing until dawn and it'll be out of my sight in half that time."

"Stay with it as long as you can. If you lose it, we'll just have to stay frosty and watch for it if it comes back around." Victor found himself hoping the Colossus would go for the base instead, regardless of the casualties. That, regardless of the risk, the Colonel would back them up with air support the moment he called him. That somehow this whole scenario would just shut down like the VR war games they went through during Basic.

The ice in his gut had hardened into a tight ball.


	3. The Chase

"Recon, we need to stay on those things. Stims authorized. Stay in cover where you can, but don't lose them. Julia, Donovan. You and I are following the uninjured one. Ben, Anna and Willis will stay on the injured Colossus. Keep in radio contact. If we're lucky, we can call in an air strike in the morning; that's six and a half hours away now. Go, go, go."

Victor had been in recon for six years. He'd never done anything like this.

He broke cover, holstering his rifle so that it didn't affect his stride, and began to run hard. The armor dogged his movements like a lead weight for a second or so, but then the power assist systems noticed his speed and kicked in to compensate. Victor could feel the cybernetic implants in his muscles flex in response, ramping up his heartbeat and injecting a cocktail of stimulant drugs into his bloodstream. He began to accelerate. Within two minutes of the run he hit fifty kilometers an hour.

The machine was still getting smaller, still faster than he was. Victor gritted his teeth and pushed himself harder. At first his heart bounced jarringly out of rhythm and spots flickered across his vision like static, but his body got used to the higher dosage within seconds. To his left, he saw Julia stagger a little before she was able to get a handle on the stim high. Victor grimaced at that; it looked like the Death's Heads weren't the invulnerable shock troopers of their reputation after all.

Sixty-five kilometers an hour, said the tachometer chip on the upper left field of his vision.

Now the massive machine wasn't going anywhere. It hung in the centre of his vision like a specter, even if it was still kilometers away. The stims did their work with well-engineered effectiveness: The exhaustion from lack of sleep, the anxiety of combat, even the faint memories of Reilly and the others were trampled down by a cold gut-swooping euphoria which turned the world into a slow and clumsy parody of its normally dangerous self. Victor couldn't have stopped chasing the Colossus if he'd wanted to.

It went on like that for two hours straight, with Victor and the others giving chase like human bloodhounds. Morning was still hours away when the initial stim high began to wear off. With his pain threshold brought to an all-time high from the adrenaline, Victor didn't even feel the injections from the implants this time. His speed barely had time to dip below sixty kph before the next stim round threw his heart into overdrive again.

They couldn't do this forever, of course. Victor had seen marines try that before. Stim overdoses got ugly-arrhythmia followed by muscle spasms which resembled epileptic seizures and even psychosis or schizophrenic paranoia in some cases. But hopefully, they could do it until dawn.

_Four hours left. Four hours left. _Victor began to chant the words to himself in his head, counting down slowly to when they would finally be finished and get away from the terrible machines before Recon ended up like all the others.

Like a parody of his own furious pursuit, the memories began to dog him.

_Reilly_. KIA mercifully quickly with a zealot blade to the chest.

_Gyles_. Crushed under rubble, suit offline but maybe still dying when they'd managed to pull Victor out.

_Hector. Ryans_. Cooked from long range by the colossus, in a blast which tore out one side of the bunker and immolated most of Ryans' body to ash.

_Paul_. Paul worst of all. Paul, a sleek and well-trained soldier who'd never blinked, always gotten the job done, always pulled the team through any disaster. A friend and a fellow hunter until his terrible reaper came down on him, as if diving down from leagues above, and reduced him to cooling meat. Speared like a fucking fish.

_Is that how I'm going? _ Every time Victor blinked, he could see Paul's face. As the chase wore on for another two hours, as the stims poured down chemical euphoria on his consciousness like ice on top of a swelling and infected wound, the flicker of shadows in his peripheral vision occasionally formed into a human being.

"Recon lead, this is Recon Six," said Anna. "Watch your nav system. I'm seeing interference and it's getting harder to get satellite coverage. Recommend mission abort."

Willis came on next. "Fuck _no_. We're so fucking close here. I'm not turning back just because we've got some kind of goddamn equipment glitch."

"Lead," spat Anna, throwing the word out like a curse, "The only way to call back to base is through nav sat communication, at the distances we're at from the base. We need to pull back to maintain contact. If falling back is the only way, then that is what we do. Request orders."

Victor turned his head reflexively, back towards Anna's position, and froze as he made eye contact with Paul. The marine was right beside him now, body immobile next to him regardless of how fast Paul was running, face corpselike but otherwise intact. The milky too-white eyes bored into Victor, and as Paul leaned around to get a closer look at him Victor could see the massive hole in the suit where the Colussus had speared him. The mortal wound was curiously clean, and the gore which spattered the armor was long dry. _It's okay, _Paul mouthed, and the dead man's mouth split into a smile. But there was nothing left behind his eyes.

Victor swallowed hard and keyed his comm. "Recon, continue pursuit."

The corpse's mouth split into a vast grin.

"_What? _Victor, are you _nuts_? Pull back. Do it now."

"I'm the ranking officer here, Anna. We go on. If we need to re-establish contact, we can use the suit-to-suit radios. You and Willis wait back here, relay the data back to base. Marauder armor isn't built for long-term stimming anyway. The rest of us keep on them."

"This is fucking stupid-"

"Do it."

"What about Ben? He's the only one on the injured colossus now."

"Julia," said Victor, "cover Ben."

He turned his head, looking for confirmation, and Paul nodded acknowledgingly. _It's okay, _he mouthed again silently. _It's okay._

Victor turned away, unable to face him. Nearby, Julia made an abrupt right turn and began sprinting harder for Ben's position. Donovan said nothing, and kept with him. Victor began to like the other man-Donovan had a dour sense of effectiveness to him that even hours worth of stim doses couldn't blunt.

Their chase had been pulling them towards a network on canyons since they'd left the base, and it was the main reason why Victor was so desperate to end this now. There were places deep enough that even a creature the size of what they hunted could hide from anything but air support, and some of those deeper canyons extended for kilometres in twisting passages that only flattened out hundreds of kilometres away from where they'd begun. If the colossi got into there, they could use the area as cover and carry out raids until they were flushed out by an air force a hell of a lot larger than the Terrans had to offer.

Paul watched it all without saying anything, without moving even if he remained in the corner of Victor's vision. Occasionally Victor's hallucinations got worse; at one point he looked up to check the Protoss machine's position when it suddenly made an abrupt about face, and charged him, growing to a massive terrible size as it loomed over him before it stabbed downwards with one of its legs. Donovan gave him a concerned look when Victor had rolled out of its way; he barely managed to get a handle on himself and managed to make the whole movement look as if he'd tripped.

The last safe stim dose they could take was two hours before sunrise; after that, it was up to their own nervous systems to keep them going. Paul faded away with all of the other extrasensory perceptions he'd brought with him, and over time Victor began to get a sense of mental balance again. He almost immediately felt shame and guilt, and not just from the comedown from the stims. He'd made a risky, if pragmatic, decision. He'd separated his command by kilometres worth of ground, and he'd ordered them to fry their judgment and concentration with drugs. If this didn't work... what came next?

_Not them too. I'm not losing them too. _ The thought was galvanizing. He ran on.

Those canyons were within about twenty kilometres away from the Colossi when sunrise began to peak over the hills. By then any sense of heightened functionality from the stims was gone. In its place was pain, soreness, and a ragged sense of something underlying coming apart like corroded supports in the centre of a bunker. Through his visor, Victor could feel the heat of the sun on his face. He pushed the last of his energy into the sprint.

Beside him, Donovan gave a small grunt of satisfaction. "We got them, sir. Call down our fucking angels, already."

Victor estimated their distance from the base, and the light levels. He felt his lips pull themselves into a bared, predatory grin.

"Recon six, Recon lead. Put me through to the colonel."

There was just static.

"_Fuck_. Recon six. Recon lead. Respond. Repeat, recon six, this is recon lead. Acknowledge transmission, over."

" Ack...Rec- lead. Suit ra-o... think it's ... ssus."

"Recon group, roll call!"

"Recon 3," said Donovan immediately. "Coming in clear sir."

"Recon 2," said Julia, followed by a "Recon 4 here" from Ben.

"Recon 3, lead. Try to raise Recon 6, over."

Minutes passed while Victor listened to Julia try without success to contact Willis or Anna. He and Donovan watched as their prey kept moving, with unbroken and constant stride, down into the canyons.

"Fuck," said Victor. He slowed to a stop, and nearly went down on one knee as his body's natural endorphin output slowed to a crawl and the illusory sense of well-being they gave finally fell away from the stim hangover like a cheap tattered curtain. Far beyond them, the colossus kept walking. They watched it slide down between the canyon walls until it disappeared from view.

"Fuck. _Fuck." _Victor tried one last time. "Colonel, this is recon lead. Come in. Colonel, recon lead, acknowledge transmission."

Donovan watched silently. Finally they both sat down. Donovan bowed his head a little, obviously fighting sleep. Victor could feel himself doing the same.

"Recon," said Victor, "regroup. Rendezvous with Anna and Willis."

"Recon lead, Recon 4. Request continued pursuit. Target is still in sight."

Victor shook his head. "Recon 4, Recon lead. Abort pursuit. Rendezvous at-" He checked the nav sat report and swore to himself as he remembered it was offline. "We're about ten klicks away from your position at this point, Recon 4. Looks like forty metres elevation from the top of the canyon, about twenty klicks due south from the first gully."

"Acknowledged. Recon lead, we have aborted pursuit. We are exfilling via the canyons, to stay out of the line of sight of the Colossus."

Donovan got down on the ground with him. Even through the layer of power armor the frustration steamed off him. As they waited, he punched the ground a couple times, shaking his head.

"We nearly had them," said Donovan, after about fifteen minutes' wait. "We nearly fucking had them. Fucking _mothballed piece of shit _equipment!" He slammed his hand, palm down, against the ground again and the strength augmentations in the powered armor were enough to leave a visible dent in the soft sandstone.

Victor shook his head. "Well, what are the odds? Equipment goes offline when we're ready to..." His voice trailed off as, finally, he caught up with the implications of what had just happened.

_Anna's voice, choppy with static over the radio:_

" Ack...Rec- lead. Suit ra-o... think it's ... ssus."

_His own mind, filling in the blanks: _

_"Acknowledge, Recon lead. Suit radio offline. I think it's the Colossus."_

"Mother of God," Victor murmured. He keyed the radio again.

"Recon, this is recon lead. This is a trap. I repeat, this is a fucking trap. Regroup and retreat from the canyon zone."

"Recon lead, Recon 3 and 4 here." It was Julia. "Transmission not received. Please repeat."

"Recon 4! This. Is. A. Trap. Leave the canyons ASAP!"

Beside him, Donovan straightened up, tense. "Sir, these are Protoss we're talking about. If they can jam us... For all we know, they can even track us via the suit radios."

Victor bit back another curse, and went back to the radio instead. "Recon group, radio silence. Exfil and regroup via line of sight and passive navsat/radar access. Do not use the radios."

"Recon lead, transmission not received. The radio system is jammed and we can't-_Shit_!" Victor thought he could hear gunfire.

Victor slumped down against the ground. It was like in the bunker, all over again. But at least this time, he knew there was nothing he could do.

For a moment, he thought he could feel Paul's shadow, waiting at his shoulder. Seconds ticked by.

Finally, Julia's voice came back on. She sounded weary, maybe a little scared.

"Recon group, this is recon 4. I don't know if you can hear me, but... I ... It took him. It took Ben, alive."

And then, over the radio, screams.


	4. The Trap

Donovan and Victor waited for about an hour longer as Recon fell in raggedly around them. Everyone was silent on the radios as they did so, something Victor was completely unaccustomed to. Communication was performed via code using the suit targeting lasers, beams tightly aimed directly onto the helmets of the others in order to minimize the probability of intercept and decryption. The other soldier wouldn't see the laser itself, since the helmet optics would detect the incoming pulse of something concentrated enough to fry a human cornea and absorb the beam. But a while back, some well-informed joker had programmed the helmet computers to transmit and receive the absorbed pulses, and found a way to type messages into the transmitter based on a couple of inconvenient facial motions. They'd then installed it on enough of the marine equipment that they could run a tontine during ops. Once he'd been found out the tontine had been dissolved but the equipment stuck around. Now it was probably going to save Victor's life, and the lives of everyone who depended on him.

Nobody spoke over the radio, except Ben, and only Victor could hear him. Ben's captors had left the radio on for rather crude and obvious psychological reasons. Victor had ordered the others to shut off their receivers, and as far as he knew they'd complied. But he couldn't bring himself to. It felt too much like abandonment. So Victor listened, even as he knew it did absolutely nothing. One last, nearly-superstitious and useless favor to a man he didn't even know, just to keep himself sane. For the first several minutes, Ben's voice had approximated that of a human being, something Victor somehow knew he could relate to even in the total absence of any words. Some undercurrent of communication that had begat language long ago still spoke to him. But as time went on, it was like a mask coming off, or meat being separated from bone. Eventually Victor could hear nothing remotely human in the screams. All that was left was animal fear and hate. After a while, Victor turned the radio off.

Then, everything was done in utter silence. The modified transceivers would put up communiqués in lines of text that scrolled across the HUD, because it was easier than trying to convert to audio.

Recon. Report.

Anna, the only member of the group whose face wasn't obscured by a suit helmet, gave him a dirty look. Her commando gear had been able to hack into the improvised network pretty quickly, and she had a subvocaliser for covert duties. Ben dead by now. No other casualties.

How'd they get him?

Julie was still for a moment, and Victor had to wonder whether she was struggling to cope with the weight of what had just happened or just trying to figure out how to use the transceiver. Surprise attack.

How? Victor wanted to shout _How in hell does a fifty-foot robot ambush someone? _but the communication system distilled his message into its most basic component.

Used the canyons. Took the low ground. Fried the ground between us to separate us. Herded Ben away.

Everyone took a moment to absorb that. Willis spoke next.

Do we have a plan?

Victor typed, Can't radio base. Can't get backup. Can't flee, too much open ground. Colossi will overtake and kill us. Can't pursue without backup.

Victor was silent for a long time. He could feel Anna's gaze on him. Finally he gave in and typed Anna. Thoughts?

Anna's response came up quickly. I'm a xenointelligence specialist. I specialize with Protoss. Command brought me in as Protoss expert, because of Protoss ruins on planet. Heard of Colossi. Think I know how to shut them down. There's a temple nearby. We never knew what it was for. Has to be control system inside, for colossi. Can't operate otherwise. We kill the temple, we kill them.

Everyone stared at Anna. Victor typed, Are you sure?

Anna laughed. No. Other ideas?

She was pushing him. In any other situation he'd have decked her for insubordination. But in this one...

_The one-eyed leading the blind and all that. _Specify location.

They moved out, back into the tightly packed region of cliffs and ridges which lay like scars in tattered swathes for hundreds of kilometres. Anna's temple lay in the middle of the region. Victor took them along a circuitous route along the outside edge of the maze of narrow valleys and canyons. He kept them to the high ground and left a wide region of plains around them, hoping that they could see an attack coming instead of being ambushed again. The chances of escape were slim, but Anna's temple was surprisingly close to them and Victor couldn't think of a better plan.

Periodically, Victor would stop and take stock of the surroundings, maybe try to get a glimpse of the temple that was supposed to be ahead of them. During one of those times he suddenly realized Anna was at his side, watching him with what looked like curiosity.

Problems, Specialist?

No sir. Anna tilted her head. The temple's not above ground, by the way. It's down in the canyons. Deep down.

How far?

Don't know. Anna said. She shifted her gaze out onto the horizon. The location comes up red hot on infrared satellite scans, but we never came out and looked for it.

Shit. How do we find it? Any landmarks we can use?

Anna shrugged, her gaze not straying. You'll know them when you see them.

Victor leaned forward with a trace of annoyed hostility. Try me now.

When Anna glanced back at him, there was an utter lack of concern in her eyes. Protoss structures, right above it. Statues, and weird landscape. One or two big crystalline monoliths called pylons.

Victor nodded in acknowledgement, as if he knew what a pylon was or could tell Protoss buildings from a pile of rock. Specialist.

Sir.

Do we have a problem, Specialist? Do you want to try acting like a soldier?

For maybe a hundredth of a second, Victor thought he caught a whiff of anger from Anna at last. Her eyes seemed to twitch as if they'd begun to narrow, but if they were she had the movement locked down fast. Her facial expression switched to apologetic and she glanced away.

Sorry sir. Having trouble staying frosty over what just happened.

Keep it together. Keep doing your job.

Anna looked back up at him, suddenly coy. How do you handle it, sir?

Victor fought down a shiver. I don't think about it.

Admirable. Permission to speak freely, sir?

Granted.

There is a lot of pain in you. Permanent trauma, in fact. It comes off you like smoke. Even without telepathy.

Victor said nothing.

Civilized human beings aren't really built to handle stresses like watching someone die. Sometimes they shut off emotional responses to cope. If that works the first time it happens, they come to rely on that response.

In the silence that followed, Victor blinked and for a second he was back in the bunker with Gyles and the others. He forced down the emotions and made himself feel nothing.

How do you feel, sir? Numb? Hollow? That's how it starts.

Victor turned suddenly, furious, a reprimand boiling up through his throat even with the suit radios offline, but when he looked at her Anna was already facing him. The expression on her face was one of empathy, not pity.

He looked away again, and marshaled himself. Telepath with a psych degree. Keep it to yourself. This is war. After that fight back at the base I'm not the only damaged one here. And by the sound of it, you're one to talk.

It's not damage. Anna shook her head, the beginnings of a grin forming. It's not. It's like... a scab coming off. What's beneath that is what we are.

Victor turned to stare at Anna, but that odd quasi-innocent expression had come back to her and he gave up fairly quickly.

Anna had been right; the temple was easy to spot once they got near it. The ground beneath their feet became firmer as they neared it, and the temperature dropped like a stone. The air gradually felt increasingly thick, and the sun polarized behind a thick blue sheen that coated the landscape and filled the air. At one point, Victor reached the top of a crag only to look down and see, floating ten metres beneath him in the air, a large and brittle-looking crystal in a distinct polyhedral shape. It was ringed with what looked like gold coral, no part of which was visibly being supported by the crystal. The entire artifice only escaped being a plausible hallucination by simultaneously being so mundane- and so strange-looking that no human being would ever imagine it. Beside him, Anna grinned and gestured dramatically down at it. See?

What is that?

Pylon.

The Death's Heads stayed frosty, keeping watch on their flanks, but Willis edged over the side to look down with them. If he reacted to the sight at all, it was contained inside his armor.

Does this mean the temple's nearby?

Yes. It's... Anna did not speak for long enough that Victor wasn't sure if she'd start up again. It will be below us somewhere, probably within the hundreds of meters. That pylon 'powers' the temple. It gives off energy near the UV spectrum, thus the blue.

And the Protoss feed off that?

We honestly have no idea why it does that, or anything else. It just is.

Victor looked down at it for a while, eyes following the fractal ridges and contours that traced over the crystal.

Right. Recon, fall in. We're getting down there.

A marine with their planet's gravity, when armored, could fall for about fifty meters without injury and with minimal suit damage. But the cliffs seemed to lead downwards forever and Victor didn't want to take any more chances. He'd customized his suit with abseiling lines years ago, as well as some handy magnetic grappling hooks, and it didn't take long to find a place to secure it. He strapped in, made sure the others knew how to use the hooks, and began abseiling down the side of the cliff wall.

He'd never liked heights. He'd requested recon assignments on the plains instead of on the mountainous terrain. But it wasn't vertigo that ran down his spine and tightened him up now. The cliff only looked like a cliff from the top. It was overhung and notched with pockets of sharp brown rock that looked like sandstone, but only for the first ten or so meters. From there it flattened, and gradually became elegantly styled with ornate pillars carved into it with a free-flowing grace that seemed organic. Hieroglyphs of alien wars, alien triumphs and myths, were stitched across it. They had a delicate air to them, but they were still hard enough that Victor's boots could grind against them as he travelled downwards without any visible damage. As he kept on, a semblance of understanding formed. Every ten meters or so, there was a new spiral of hieroglyphs, roughly consistent with changes in the type of rock. A story, carved with terrific care into the face of the cliff, took form. A hunt, by the look of it. In the first relief of each 'glyph, there were figures, sometimes one, sometimes several. Sometimes they were aliens Victor couldn't recognize. Several times, especially near the top of the cliff, they were Terran. As he came downwards, more and more often, he saw creatures which seemed to resemble the tall Protoss warriors he'd fought before. Always, they were running towards the next panel. Victor couldn't see a pursuer. There was only the sun, rising in the first panel and gradually growing taller in the day as the hunt progressed. As the day wore on, the figures grew less in number, or appeared to be limping. Finally, in the last panel of all of the stories woven into the pillar, the last survivor would be collapsed on the ground, as if begging or in worship, of the setting sun that blazed fire across an empty sky.

Victor stopped on the rope, in shock, as he finally realized what the sun was meant to represent.

_"Contact!"_

It hadn't been over the semaphore. There wasn't time.


	5. The Temple

It was Anna who had spotted them. She'd stayed at the top of the cliff, cloaked, watching for when their pursuers had appeared. Ordering her to stay at the top was one of the few rational decisions Victor felt like he had made.

"Where? How far?"

"They used the damn canyons again. We've got the injured one coming up now, about a kilometer away. And it's moving damned fast, Vic. ETA three minutes."

"_Fuck. _Recon, down the side of the canyon, now. Whoever's still on the grapnel when that thing gets here, won't even need a burial."

He suited action to words, sending himself down the cable fast enough to make the endless parade of ritual sacrifice in front of him blur. He went down what seemed like a hundred or so meters before the rock face in front of him opened up. The whole face expanded inwards like the inside of a cathedral, walled by blue curving stone that looked well-built and well-maintained. The architecture wasn't built for humans, and it didn't look like it was built for Protoss either: The floor itself was at a 45-degree angle most of the way, the polished blue stone so smooth that Victor couldn't have fit a knife edge into anywhere. The pillars joined into it, somewhere about another hundred and fifty meters below him. As he looked down to gauge the distance, the legends of heroic death at the feet of the Protoss' machine gods seemed to toil away into infinity.

There were a few tiers, their architecture suggesting they were some sort of observation platforms, near the top of the cathedral. One started about a meter away from the pillar he was abseiling down, and snaked away along the inside of the cathedral. It seemed to circumnavigate the entire structure. Victor tried to gauge its length and gave up. The cathedral was massive. It could have been a mile long. But he could see the dim light of pylons along it. Every few hundred meters a hole in the middle of the deck opened up to allow a pylon to rest with its upper half poking up through the platform.

_Pylons. Power sources. Maybe what we need's nearby._

He kicked hard against the pillar to set himself swinging, and as he flew back towards it he leaned out and kicked slightly with his foot as he went by. The movement had the desired effect: Victor swung past the pillar and managed to get close enough to reach out and try to pull himself onto it. He clutched fingers against the floor, for there were no guardrails of any kind, and his fingers slid right along and off of it. Victor swung back out into the air.

"Fuck!"

"Lead, Anna. We're all above you, now. ETA thirty seconds!"

Victor swore again, and as he sailed back towards the platform he pulled out his rifle and snapped the safety off.

_Fuck this. _

The recoil made his hand shake, but he was barely aiming anyway and the target was more than big enough. The bullets scored the blue surface and tore into it. When he came back around again, Victor had his gun holstered and slammed into the platform on his forearms and faceplate. There was too much of him hanging off, and he began to slide. His fingers skittered about for purchase. He felt three of the fingers on his right hand bite down. His left hand kept going, and his whole body whiplashed around his right arm, what few fingers he had in the bullet holes gripping down with machine-augmented strength.

It was enough. Barely.

Victor didn't even let himself hang in space long enough to get his breath back. Servos churned as he dragged himself back onto the ledge. He pulled himself into a crouch and sprinted for the nearest pylon out of sheer instinct, pulled his end of the magnetic grapnel out and engaged it right against the surface of the blue crystal. It hung in the air next to it for a second as if unsure, blue flickering about it like alien fire, but then it pulled in hard to the pylon's surface and refused to budge. Victor grinned roughly. _Well. Thank fuck for small favors. _

The rest of his team came down behind him without so much as a warning. Willis, Julia, Donovan, and Anna practically flew down the rope and landed in front of him, all of them but Anna hitting the ground running for cover. Anna spared a second to glance up, and Victor was surprised to see her gasp.

"Mother of God," Anna breathed, "it's coming down." And then she was running for cover.

Victor could hear the disbelief in Willis' voice. "Can it even-"

It could.

Victor glanced over the pylon he'd thrown himself against, and spared a moment for amazement. The canyon they'd come down was an even fifty meters wide, the stone on either side for the most part hewn into smooth rock-only now did Victor realize what had probably done that. Despite it all he watched as a spindly leg that was as thin as a young tree in its narrowest point, and the height of Victor's barracks back at base, lower itself elegantly into the canyon. It probed for purchase amongst the rock on the other side of the canyon. There was a brief pause, maybe a second long, spent in utter silence as it gently scraped against the canyon wall. Then it took, and the machine's leg seemed to lock. Another leg came down, like one of God's own fingers, and found a roost midway up one of the pillars.

Lead, we need to hold fire, said Anna. Victor relayed the command to the others, paused to take stock. Julia and Donovan were huddled another hundred fifty meters or so away, behind another pylon. He caught a scraping of Willis's bulky shadow at another pylon even further away.

Recon, the Colossus is still injured. Damage is on the hip joint. The semaphore didn't supply emotion, but the expression on Anna's face looked like excitement. Target the hip after I take down the shields.

_Pity we don't have time to find the controls yet, _thought Victor. _This is going to be one tough son of a bitch to take down_. And he remembered all the portraits of the sacrifices, captured and carved forever into the rock by the Colossi.

The machine god made no noise at all as its legs bent. A third foot came down, found the floor of the temple. By now Victor could see the base of the machine's body, the elegantly curved golden metal deformed and charred black on one of the ball joints for its legs. The Colossus dipped a little lower, and Victor could suddenly make out its insectile photoreceptor head, casting about for prey. It scanned over the cover Willis was behind, and for a moment the head flexed forward excitedly like a hound's.

Victor felt his trigger finger tighten instinctively. He flicked a glance at Anna, who shook her head. She'd unloaded her rifle's normal clip, and was now reloading EMP grenades into the barrel with the quick but silent motions of a spec ops veteran. Just a sec, she mouthed. Victor bit back a curse.

The Colossus kept coming down, in fluid calm movements that reminded Victor of some of the big sea predators he'd seen in a menagerie once. After its four legs had touched the floor of the temple, the top of its leviathan body nearly scraped against the ceiling. The cannons on either side of its head flexed forwards, tilting as if sniffing the air, tracking Willis' position. There was a sound like a blade slashing through dry grass as the atmosphere ripped apart with the strength of the blast. Victor's HUD flared white, his helmet blocking the burst of harsh orange light. He could smell ozone. The Colossus' beams were powerful enough to cook the air itself.

The Colossus had melted the floor in a smooth circular arc. It was far enough away from the pylon Willis was behind that it couldn't fire downwards behind it, not yet. It looked to Victor as if the beams had carved the floor maybe six feet from Willis' hiding spot. The Colossus stepped forward again, easily a span of eight armored marines, and the air lit up again. Now the blast was about a foot or so closer to Willis. The vast machine made a grating, popping electric sound, like a thunderstorm trying to chuckle.

_It's toying with him, _Victor realized.

Anna leaned out from behind the pylon and fired. The EMP was just slow enough to see as it soared towards the machine god. Several meters away from the Colossus, the shield threw up a bubble of solid blue light and the EMP detonated. The insect head turned slightly, as if bemused. The next grenade hit the Colossus a second later. The bubble came up again, and for a moment Victor watched it torque and distort around the EMP. Then it vanished entirely. The whole Colossus lit up in hot blue light the color of a welding torch.

"Weapons free! Go for the joints!"

This, Victor knew and liked far better than waiting to die. The tension cracked out of him and the world became a fast fluid thing of motion and fire, as if he was being pulled hard down a whitewater river. The joy of violence sucked him under.

Bullets rattled and tore off the Colossus' golden hide, and the hip wheeled ever so slightly with the impact of Willis' grenade. But the vast thing found its balance easily enough, and took another step forward. The cannons were focused this time rather than sweeping, hitting the pylon Willis was behind. As he reloaded, Victor watched the shields crackle in mid air for a few seconds and then vanish. As the heat rays struck the crystal, they refracted and boiled away into millions of fragmented shapes.

_Bet that pylon's near cooked by now. Hundreds of degrees hot, even. _

_Oh. Shit. _

"Willis! Willis, get the _fuck_ away from there!"

The pylon ripped apart, and Willis gave a startled yowl. Victor watched the Marauder armor fly backwards several meters and slam hard into the ground from the force of the explosion. The pylon fragments skittered through the air like knives, pursued by a vast blue nebula of a cloud that evaporated as fast as it had formed. Victor checked his HUD for Willis' vitals, and swore. Heart rate spiking, blood pressure dropping. _He's probably dying inside that tin can right now. _

The entire platform made a groaning sound, ominously similar the noise Victor had heard when his bunker had caved in around him. From the Colossus, there was that horrible electric chuckle again. The beams hit another pylon, now Julia and Donovan's. The pylon began to make a sizzling noise.

Anna and Victor hit it hard, Anna hitting the joints while Victor sprayed at the head. The compound sensors it seemed to use for eyes were built out of something much harder than glass, but the bullets did the job enough. There was a sound like something shattering and suddenly the Colossus pulled back hard as if stung, cannons flaring out, reeling backwards angrily towards Victor's position.

Julia and Donovan made their regiment proud. They took the cue as if they'd been doing overwatch for Victor all their lives. As he reloaded, they pounded it again on its hip joints. The machine wheeled back towards them, as if irritated. Victor even saw a few more grenades wheel lazily away from Willis' position and rip hefty chunks out of the Colossus' armor.

Anna punched his shoulder. "It isn't enough," she growled.

"What? We're-"

"Victor, look at that fucking thing. We're just pissing it off. We want to take down this thing, we need bigger munitions than one Marauder cannon."

Victor paused while the Colossus swept its lasers over and around their cover again, to force them to keep their heads down. He made himself huddle under the pylon, until he could feel the shields pushing him gently away from the surface. The Colossus was almost twenty feet away from him now. "Well, what the fuck have we got?"

"You Marine cowboys have those fusion cores in your suits. I was thinking we'd use one of those."

"What? How do we get the suit close enough? And we couldn't... God, Anna. Are you talking about kamikaze?"

"Got a better idea? We're all dead in this fucking tomb if we don't take that thing down. Somebody gets onto it, detonates themselves. Whatever it takes."

"No. No way. I'm not ordering someone to-"

"I'll do it." Donovan said.

And suddenly Victor realized the radio was still broadcasting to the whole squad.

"Don, no. You're not-" The rays swept around him again, and he paused to push himself further inward before he realized the Colossus had changed tactics and was now hitting the pylon again. "I'm not ordering you to-"

"Been a privilege, sir."

Victor glanced towards where Donovan was. He watched the marine rise up into a low crouch, and back up a little for runway. Then the man leapt. He must have stimmed himself first, because he soared an even twenty meters and had the reflexes to wrap himself around the leg joint when he hit. Donovan pulled himself up, wrapped himself around the shell of the hip joint.

Victor watched, with cold fascination devoid of emotional impact, as the Colossus tried to shake the Marine off. Willis, apparently still mostly conscious, began firing the only weapon they had with a big enough punch to guarantee a core detonation. The first missile went wide by about six feet. Victor could hear Donovan over the radio, still swearing, breathing hard with the effort of fighting the machine. The next shot went wide by about two feet.

"Do it!" Donovan yelled. "I can't wrestle this thing forever!"

The third missile hit true. Victor heard a howl like a war cry for a fraction of a second before Donovan flew apart, his own body's destruction muted and hidden mercifully by the terrible blast of the core. The explosion tore off a leg and the metal melted away like mercury. The Colossus gave a shrill, furious howl of its own and then it lunged forward, plowing forward into the gantry as it fell. The whole platform bucked hard as the vast thing hit, like a bridge trying to hold the weight of a falling skyscraper, and then the ground under Victor's feet slewed vertical and everything began to topple downwards.

The last thing Victor saw before his HUD went black were Julia's vitals flashing out.


	6. The Worship

_Dark. _

_It's utterly dark, a night that might last forever. Victor can't see anything, not even his own hands as they scull back and forth somewhere around him. He's naked, immersed in a pool of cold water that ripples back and forth around his body and robs him of hard-earned heat. He can feel himself slowing down. He can feel himself going numb. _

_Wherever he is, he has to keep swimming or he'll die. He knows that at a level beneath his own consciousness. It's a thought that's driven him before. It's what's keeping him from letting go. He can't even feel his hands anymore, but he keeps going. Inside the vast cold emptiness, Victor treads water and waits. _

_The sound of something surfacing, and slow breathing next to him. Victor turns his head but sees nothing. _

_"Someone there?"_

_Nothing answers. The breathing becomes slower, labored, rasps a little. Victor turns a little further. _

_"Hello?"_

_He can barely make out the glint that might be an eye. Maybe the shadow of the contour of a face. _

_The breathing stops entirely. _

_In the space of one awful second, Victor realizes it's Paul. He jerks away, swimming hard in the opposite direction, but the water's getting colder now, and more viscous. It's holding on to Victor, prying at him, pulling him down. In the shadows around him, behind and beneath the frantic turbulent reflections of the splashes of water he's throwing up, he can make out the faces of the dead. He can feel hands, grasping, pulling at him, insistent. Victor dives downwards in desperation, and the cold rips into his eyes and nose and the sudden gasp he makes pulls it into his lungs and freezes him from the inside out. He's numb now. The others let go, subside and remain at the surface. Victor lets himself float, suspended in an ocean of night. He lets himself look down, and sees nothing but endless shadow for miles and miles in the water beneath him._

_And then the shadows beneath him coalesce into a vast terrible _thing, _miles long and incomprehensible to look at. It rises up to meet him. _

And he jackknifed into consciousness, awakening bleary-eyed inside his armored shell.

Anna was several meters away, cleaning out the barrel of her rifle with a critical eye. She had munitions from Willis' suit scattered around her in various stages of modification, along with a few choice circuitry components from Willis' suit. In fact, there were too many to have come from Willis' suit alone. Julia's and Willis' combined, even.

_So._

She turned to look at him before he could really move or say anything. His suit was a little too rugged to measure consciousness states, so it must have been via telepathy. "Oh, hello sir," she said. "I wasn't sure you'd ever wake up."

Victor didn't say anything, but his eyes flickered to the jury-rigged bombs that contained pieces of his suit. Anna just laughed.

"Right," she said. "Sorry about that, but I didn't know whether you'd wake up before the other one came by to finish us off. I have a plan, sir. The beginnings of one, anyway. We don't have anything that can fire a shell big enough to take down a Colossus, but if we put these bombs in the right places of the temple we can trigger a-"

"Where are my men?"

Anna's eyes broke contact with his. It didn't seem like she was ashamed to Victor. It seemed rehearsed.

"No one else survived. I'm sorry."

"Where are they? How did they die? _What the fuck happened to..._"

He broke off. Anna shrugged, after an uncomfortable silence.

"You know what happened to Donovan. Julia died when the Colossus brought down the platform we were standing on. Willis was tough enough to survive the fall, but he was already dying inside that suit. His heart stopped about an hour ago."

Victor felt a strange numbness. He'd expected grief or some horrific, violent level of pain. He hadn't expected to feel nothing.

"Anna, you said there was a control system. For the Colossi. Where is it?"

Anna's gaze shifted back to him, and there was something sly hiding inside of it. She seemed to be debating with herself as to what she should say.

"There isn't one."

Victor couldn't consciously recall getting up off the ground. One second he was lying there staring at her. The next, he'd tackled her and his armored hands were squeezing her throat shut.

"You _bitch_!"

Anna squirmed and gasped under his grip. "Nuh... Necessary. Best cover for miles here...Did. Didn't know if you'd agree."

"_Fuck you_! This is my command! These are my people!" Victor shook his head, groped for words. "They, they were my...Fuck you, Anna, I was supposed to keep them alive."

Anna made a gargled clicking noise that took Victor a second to realize was a chuckle underneath his throat hold. "Yeah. Till they need to... die."

Victor shook his head and said nothing. Anna struggled for air, and succeeded in getting her windpipe open enough to stay conscious.

"Hey, Vic, dunno if you've noticed but I'm the last of your command. Gonna kill me, now? Huh?"

Victor slackened his grip ever so slightly. "No. And I'm not letting you go just yet, either. I don't trust you. Why the fuck did you do all this? Why lie to me? Think I couldn't handle these things?"

"I don't think you're sane enough to," she whispered.

"The hell does that mean?"

She was still for a little while, her eyes slanted sideways away from him, remembering. When she finally spoke, her voice was hushed and weak.

"I grew up on Tarsonis. Have you ever been there?"

"No."

She sighed. "It was beautiful, before the Zerg hit. They'd preserved the oceans, left them pure and full of life. My daddy was a fisherman, and I grew up on the water. Every day he'd bring me down to the harbors and I'd look at all the fresh catches with him. I wasn't psychic then. Not yet.

"One day, there was a big, big fish there. A kraken. A couple boats'd gone missing, then a big trawler, and then a naval ship went out there to find them. They found a little wreckage, and then the kraken came at them."

She blinked. Could Victor see tears? He wasn't sure.

"It killed half the crew, but they gutted it anyway. Hard fight. Kraken are hundreds of feet long when you include the tentacles, and their actual bodies are wrapped in big, tough shell. They dragged it back to the harbour with them, and laid it out across whole the beach so the village could see. Me and my daddy came down to see it."

Anna shivered.

"It wasn't dead. Only I could tell. I walked right up to its big cold eye that was as big as a car, and I touched it, and I fell into its mind. I could feel its thoughts. It saw prey. It wanted to eat me up. That was. That was the first time I went into something else's mind."

Victor's mind retreated to when he'd heard a couple of soldiers, one of them a conscript who used to have a psych degree, talk about trauma. About how it could freeze emotional development at whatever age it occurred at. By then Anna's eyes had shifted back to him and she gave him a brilliant smile, mask back on over her damage.

"That's what a Colossus is, Victor. It's a predator. It doesn't have morality, or empathy, or love or hate, or any of those... flaws. It's like a god. The Protoss here worship it. Because it isn't damaged, like most sentient life is. It. Just. Kills." Her grin gained teeth. "I'm going to kill it, Victor. I'm going to fucking kill it."

Victor stared at her for a while, searching for some flaw in her armor and finding none. Eventually he stopped trying.

He unwrapped his hands, grudgingly, from her throat. Got off her, and sat back so they were a few feet apart. Anna grimaced, and rubbed the part of her artery where one of his fingers had gripped. Head down like a broken doll's.

Victor closed his eyes, and thought of all the others. Willis, Julia, Donovan, Ben. Try as he might, he didn't have any pain left to spare for any of them. There was only the mission, now.

"So what happened to the Colossus?"

Anna glanced up. She licked her lips with the tip of her tongue and smiled grimly.

"Something you need to see," she told him.

Anna led Victor down over the ruined scaffold that they'd made their last stand on hours before. He could see holes in the pile of debris and loose stone that implied Anna had dug him and Julia out. Julia's body was hanging limply on the edge a hole maybe a solid 10 feet deep into the rubble, helmet and head smashed like a bowl of eggs but armor otherwise intact.

Beneath the rubble, something moved. A twitch, like a sleeping man's leg shifting under blankets. Victor startled, but Anna looked over and grinned at him. She kept walking up the debris pile, until Victor could see what was buried beneath it.

Its head and body were dented and smashed. Metallic chunks of the cannons that had been used to burn Willis now lay about in curved, blackened shapes like paper that had caught fire. Something like glass lay scattered over everything; Victor could hear it crunch under his boots as he walked.

The 'head' which housed its sensors was about as big as a marine. It was leaning into the rubble as Victor came near it, sparks leaping off the exposed alien circuitry with little fizzles and pops. It seemed to hear Victor, and thrashed around to look at him. The metallic irises behind the eyes drew a bead on him, its attempts at focusing clumsy from the damage.

Anna gave it a good hard kick, and the head twitched away. "See?" she said. "Still alive."

" So what now, Anna?"

Anna shrugged, youthful energy returning. "We've got homemade bombs from our suits. I say we mine the temple, lure the other Colossus back here, and bring the whole place down on them."

"Uh huh. How do we lure it in, Anna?"

Soft-but-harsh laughter. "Dunno."

"Are you sure the collapse will kill them?"

"No, but we haven't got anything stronger than several thousand tons of alien-reinforced rock anyway so if this doesn't work we're properly fucked. Besides, conventional weaponry made enough of a dent to bring one down so the roof should work too."

"How do we kill them without dying in the process?"

"We might get out. Depends how we lure it in. But I'm not sure how we'd do that either. Why?" Anna winked at him. "Do you care?"

Victor paused, seriously considering the question. "No," he said finally. "No, I don't care at all."

This time, Anna's laughter felt infectious. Victor chuckled along with her, already eying the ceiling for where they'd place the charges. Beneath them, the machine god they'd brought down watched them both through mechanical eyes.


	7. The Prayer

The temple was quiet. It felt to Victor like something waiting to be born, out of the silence.

Anna was spending her time laying charges, debating with herself the most fragile beams and points of structural failure in an utterly alien edifice, so beyond Victor at least that he wouldn't know where to start. Beyond Anna as well, he suspected. For all they knew, blowing up the pylons was all it would take and they'd strapped the makeshift fusion bombs they had to them for good measure. For his own part, Victor had finished salvaging what ammo and weaponry he could from the others' suits. It made for a scant and near-empty inventory, but if they were lucky they'd only need actual ammo as a distraction. The real weapon was the cathedral itself.

_Assuming that the immortal god-thing we're fighting is dumb enough to come inside to start with. _Victor grunted, irritated more than anything else at the low chances they had of success. _If it doesn't just bring the cave down on us and its crippled sibling on its own. _

He'd gone back to sit near the Colossus, or at least near the bulk of sensors that seemed to serve for its head. If it started to move, he wanted to be able to pump a few hundred rounds into the head instead of just standing there gaping.

It was good to have work to do. It kept his mind off what had happened. What, in all likelihood, would happen. Victor sat there, cleaning his rifle, waiting.

Eventually, he became aware of a scratching noise. Behind it came a faint humming, like the crackling of static electricity. He immediately glanced in the direction of the sound, reflexes itching. It was minute, but he could see the rubble was shifting and pulling at itself. It wasn't the movements of it coming apart stone by stone, an upward surge of debris and shrapnel with the flawless gold of the terrible machine beneath it, though. The movement had a strange rhythm to it, back and forth. The rocks and blue-edged debris from the architecture moved with it.

Victor sat for a while and watched. Finally he got up and crept down to see.

It was one of the intact legs. It had three joints like a human's, but that was about where the similarities ended. It was thin and contoured as if it had been pulled until the centre stretched and narrowed like putty, and it ended in a single claw like an insect's. The Colossus had managed to get the claw barely upright, and was moving it across the ground with clumsy but exquisite care. It was scratching into the rock beneath it. It was writing.

Victor stared at the words, understanding and the cold knowledge of the consequences to come dripping down eagerly behind his eyes. It took him a while to do anything.

"Anna! Anna, get down here!"

"Huh?"

"Just get down here already!"

He waited. Anna was several hundred yards away, buried hip-deep in rubble while she hid another one of the explosives, and it took her a while to get over to him. But he saw with some satisfaction the expression on her face as she crested a nearby ridge of broken metal and saw what he could see.

She turned her head, not understanding as Victor had decided she wouldn't understand.

"'Kill me'?" She said finally, hands on hips. "I don't get it. The hell is it writing that for? A mind game?"

"Maybe," Victor said flatly, "but I don't think so. I've been thinking about what you've said." He mimicked her reverent tones with only the faintest hint of mockery. "'It's a god, Vic. It just kills.' I don't think it is."

Anna frowned at him, mutinous, defiant. "Come one. It played us the whole way. What it did to Ben-"

"What _they_ did to Ben. Two of them, Anna. And a whole Protoss army besides, before that. These things can feel, all right. They need to have some capacity for allegiance. They need to be able to care about their comrades. They'd make for terrible war machines if they didn't."

She swung her arms wide. "Then what do you call this? This whole planet was a slaughter house, for millennia. Protoss were being sacrificed to those things for as long as they'd been around!"

"They sacrificed themselves, Anna. They're a warrior race. In peace time..." He let the words hang. "These things are built for war. Maybe they can even go insane without it. So long as they're awake, they have to kill. That doesn't make them gods, or monsters. Just killing machines that need to stay sharp."

"So why the hell is this one going suicidal on us?"

Victor grimaced, ran his tongue along the inner ridges of his lower lip. "It can't walk. Probably never will. And it's immortal. It's just desperate. And the other one will be too."

"Fuck off. You can't know that."

"Bet me, Anna." Victor laughed, and the sound sounded sharp and raucous in his ears. "Bet our lives. The other one's going to come here. All the way down and in here, to finish us off and then its friend. Out of pity, and arrogance." He laughed again. "It can be ruthless, all right. But to do what it did? Play us? Hunt us? Predict where we'd go, what we'd do, how to kill us? It needed _empathy._"


	8. The Fall

Sunset fell in shards through the gaps in the cliff bands while they waited. The light fell and lay across the crippled form of the god they'd felled, gradually ebbing away like weakly-running tides. It fell across Victor, and for a few scant seconds he blinked in the flare until his helmet corrected for it. It fell for what felt like forever. Eventually, night came in full and Victor's vision flickered gently into garishly-contrasted green.

They kept waiting. Victor could feel Anna's skepticism, as if it was radiating outwards from her position hundreds of meters away on the other side of the temple. The plan was simple: Lure the beast in with a firefight, then retreat towards the exit. Detonate the roof when they were close enough to get out. He listened to his own heart beat. Checked his ammunition, his weapon, his armor, his alternate points of cover. He waited.

It must have been kilometers away when he started to feel it. Before, the pursuit had been hectic and sudden and he hadn't had enough time or silence to hear the Colossus coming. Now, squatting in the darkness of the ancient cave, he felt a slow drumming rumble. A strange, almost-arrythmic four-note beat that came out of the ground and reverberated through his armor. On the other side of the cave, he actually saw Anna lean out from where she was hiding and grin at him, nodding in acknowledgement.

Below them, the fallen Colossus twisted and made a soft sound like metal tearing. In a strange, disconnected way, Victor found himself wondering what it might be feeling. The rumbling grew, crescendo-ed into an earthquake presence that ripped through him and danced along the interface between his body and his armor like fire. Then it stopped.

Victor waited. Beside him, from somewhere unnamed, he felt Paul next to him, barely visible out of the corner of his eye. All the others too maybe, settling in behind Victor like the wake behind a boat.

It descended. Clawlike feet nestled down against the blue-tinged cliff rock and found purchase there. The golden metal of the terrible machine dappled the cliffs like sunbeams. As it came down Victor felt a cold apprehension, deja vu from hours before. He flipped through his mental inventory-_ammo in, weapon ready, armor online, bolt points there and there and there_-but he didn't look away. It gathered itself, centred impossibly against the utterly vertical wall of the cliff, legs huddled together around its big kraken head. The mechanical eyes shuttered about spastically, settled on its crippled twin on the temple floor.

The Colossus howled. Victor had never heard anything like it. It was eons unravelling, like an ancient star going nova and collapsing into the heaviest matter in the universe. Victor had a brief, unknowing almost-comprehension of what it would be like, after uncounted time spent immortal, to rediscover death. From the other side of the temple, he saw a muzzle flash and the Colossus suddenly flickered as if struck by lightning. The great beast reeled, casting about for its prey, as another blast struck it. The second EMP did the job fine, the shields tearing themselves apart and flickering into nothing.

The beast howled again, this time loud enough that Victor's helmet attenuated the noise after a second or so, and crossed the gap into the temple. It charged towards where the EMPs had come from, although Anna was cloaked and had fled already. Secure in his cover on the other side of the temple, Victor huddled down a little lower nonetheless.

Victor saw a flicker of motion maybe 30 meters away, as if the air had spontaneously grown thick enough to bend the light. It was Anna, naturally. He watched her settle in against the temple rock, and maybe the space that was her head shifted in a way almost perceptible as a nod. Her cloak dissolved away and she emerged back into visibility.

Red light slammed down between them. Victor scrabbled back, shock pushing him and telling him where to go. He ran hard for the next piece of cover, diving the last few meters, slamming hard into a crenellated pillar he'd figured would be big enough to hold for a shot or two. He fired, still on one knee as he got up, and the bullets ricocheted and bounced off the Colossus like rainfall. But the great machine ignored him.

The fire came down again, and this time the crippled Colossus beneath them made an enraged vindicated noise. Over the wireless, he heard Anna shriek. He fired the last of his clip and fell back into cover, glanced over to Anna. She'd been thrown back by the force of the blow, or maybe just had dived hard when she'd seen it coming, and was curled fetally on the floor behind cover. She wasn't moving. Although he couldn't see any damage, her back was to Victor and her arms and legs lay curled behind the curve of her back and the olfactory enhancements in his suit hinted of cooked flesh. Then, shaking, she pushed herself up on one arm and Victor saw.

One half of her body had been slagged. Her left arm dangled useless across her chest, a merge of armor fabric and skin and cooked muscle. There was a long wide black-red streak down and across her abdomen, and the beam had nearly sheared her left leg out from under her. The dregs of the beam had carried up over her face and head as it ebbed away. She shook her head, as if to dislodge the injuries from herself, and then looked at him. What was left of her face, traumatized, skeletal, gave him a vicious and terrible grin.

"Fuck! Anna! I'm coming! Stay down!"

She stared at him, uncomprehending, and then shook her head. She hefted the detonator in her remaining hand, the punchline to a cosmic joke.

"Anna! Anna, _DON'T!_"

And then it all came apart and down.


	9. The Grave

_He's floating again, treading water again. There's an inky black sky far above him with a few white motes that might be stars. They're too faint for him to tell if they're just tricks of the light, reflected glimmers from the surface of the sea that he's in. _

_Something bumps against his arm. Victor ignores it. He's still looking into the sky, trying to find something that isn't there. Trying not to look down, or around him, at what's floating in the water around him, gradually pulled away by the current. There's a whispering, echoing cacophony of voices in his head, shards of the people they used to belong to. Somewhere from off the horizon, Victor can hear Ben's animal screaming, devolved and mutilated into a beast rather than a person. He feels the current pull at him, feels what's floating past bump into him._

"It doesn't feel, Victor, it's like a god, it doesn't have compassion or regret or any of those flaws, I'm going to fucking kill it..."

_That voice, he knows. He glances down a bit, meets Anna's eyes. Her corpse has kept her injuries. There's only one eye, looking up at the stars maybe to whatever distant perspective he's searching for. Victor stares at her, pityingly, understanding now. Mercifully, she stays dead. Her eye stares outwards, unblinking, and she floats away. _

_Victor watches them all go. Anna. Ben. Donovan. Julia. Willis. He watches them follow the tide. He keeps swimming. _

_If there's a beast hunting him from beneath the waters, it doesn't bother him. _

He woke up coughing, his suit's air contaminated and leaky. Cave dust washed into him. He groped about in darkness, felt rock and debris. He pulled at it, lashed away, clumsy. It worked, eventually.

His path was slow, and meandering, and gradual. He found Anna's canister rifle on the way, still a couple rounds left. Eventually, he found his way into what remained of the vast open space of the temple. The entire floor was caked with debris, a pile so tall that all that remained of the space was a small slice near what used to be the roof that led back out into the canyon. Victor picked his way up the moiraine slowly, tripping and feeling the loose rock skitter away beneath his feet. He limped on.

Near the entrance, something stirred beneath his feet. Victor looked down, tilted his head at what he saw, but if he was surprised he didn't show it. His face could have been carved out of rock.

Beneath him, the Colossus' head stirred. Scraps of torn-apart architecture, once artfully carved and beautiful, flecked away as it twitched. Victor tried to speak, found he had to cough out dust and blood for a few tens of seconds instead.

"I could kill you," he said finally. "Anna would have. She thought it would have meant something."

The beast stared back, and Victor reckoned it probably understood him.

"I could leave you here, and it would probably be like torture. Maybe I would have done that, once. It would have been revenge. For Ben, and maybe all the others you've killed."

He waited for his ghosts to come back to him, for a drug-addled hallucination of Paul to hassle him, for Anna to mock his ability to feel, for anything. Nothing came.

"I'm leaving you here," said Victor, "alive, because I can't spare the bullets. This isn't for Anna. This isn't for me, or for any of the others. This isn't anything. You're just another casualty."

Victor walked away and upwards. As he reached the edge of the debris pile he found the canyon wall was still relatively intact; he began to climb up the wall. With no anchoring system, it was always possible that he could screw it up and fall all the way to the bottom, but he wasn't sure he cared anymore anyway. He climbed slow, and careful, his armored suit taking the weight.

He was halfway up when he heard the Colossus wail. He heard fragments of Ben in the voice. He heard a person, breaking. Victor didn't even break stride. He kept climbing, pulling himself upwards, careful and patient as a machine. But his lips twisted into something grotesque, something that long ago might have once been a smile.


End file.
